Future Of Middle East Appears A Bit Brighter

JERUSALEM — As important as any concrete agreements reached on Friday between Israel and the Palestinians is what the success in negotiating them portends for the future.

To many Israelis and Palestinians watching from the outside, as the talks appeared to be deadlocked this week, it did not seem to be the dawn of the new peacemaking era that Prime Minister Ehud Barak had promised.

It looked to many just like the old ultimatums, recriminations and obstructionism at work.

It looked like a replay of the era of Benjamin Netanyahu, the former prime minister who inherited the peace process and begrudgingly pushed it forward.

But nothing made senior Israeli officials more incensed this week than even a whispered comparison to the Netanyahu days, for they knew, as did all the parties involved -- Israeli, Palestinian, American and Egyptian -- that the dynamic had altered significantly.

They knew, as did the others, that there would be a deal in a matter of days, once the standard 11th-hour crisis was behind them.

And they knew that the moment was ripe: Barak's aggressive desire to make peace in a big, regional way was matched by the equally keen determination of Yasser Arafat, who is 70 years old and suffers health problems, to proceed speedily toward a final, fixed and lasting peace deal with the Israelis.

Even before an agreement was reached on Friday night to revive the frozen peace effort, a senior Palestinian negotiator, Saeb Erekat, acknowledged that the dynamics of the dialogue had changed for the better.

It was not only that he and Gilad Sher, the Israeli negotiator, had met publicly and as equals. But for the first time in a long time, he said, he was able to put himself in the shoes of the Israelis and see things through their eyes.

That feeling is almost as significant an accomplishment as the memorandum itself, which is a detailed plan to resuscitate and carry out the Wye River agreement, negotiated in Maryland last fall. Negotiating the plan was the first test of whether a rapport could be established between the new Israeli government and the Palestinians.

Without the new rapport that enabled this deal, the ambitious task ahead -- of forging a permanent peace within a year -- would seem laughable. If either side had allowed a disagreement over the release of 50 prisoners -- which was this week's final sticking point -- to kill the deal, then it would have boded ill for their ability to come to terms on such complex issues as Jerusalem and the return of refugees.

The Israelis' self-imposed deadline of reaching a deal before the arrival of Secretary of State Madeleine Albright somewhat backfired on them. It created an artificial sense of failure when it took just a few days longer than expected. It also lent the impression that Albright was indeed needed to nudge the parties into agreement.

But Barak had wanted to deliver an agreement as a present to the U.S. secretary of state, whose Middle East peace team had officiated at so many Israeli-Palestinian meetings during the Netanyahu years that they became minor celebrities in the region.

And the Palestinians knew that their window of opportunity could close; Albright was scheduled to travel today to Damascus to work on reopening Israeli-Syrian negotiations, and they didn't want their conflict to move to the back burner of priorities.

Barak was also determined to restore the Israeli-Palestinian relationship to a bilateral one, and he did make strides in that direction. The modified Wye agreement apparently struck both sides as a better document than the U.S.-brokered original.

That became clear when Barak's negotiating weapon -- a threat to carry out the original as written -- worked. Arafat must have thought in the end that the new agreement was a better deal for the Palestinians.

Early this week, Barak threatened to end the negotiations if the Palestinians didn't accept the Israelis' offers. Many Palestinians cringed. The issuance of ultimatums was a throwback to the Netanyahu era.

But then came the unexpected, underscoring a real change: Barak reportedly called Arafat and apologized for his threatening tone.